


The Ugly Duckling

by unorigelnal (jayburding)



Series: On The Wing [1]
Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Gen, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-21
Updated: 2012-04-21
Packaged: 2017-11-04 02:02:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayburding/pseuds/unorigelnal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deanon from the kinkmeme.<br/>Prompt: <i>Anon has noticed a distinct lack of wing!fic. This needs to be addressed.<br/>Would prefer an always-had-wings approach rather than a holy-Hel-where'd-these-come-from plot. Take a look at the day to day of winged!Asgard? See how movie plot changes when there are wings involved?<br/>Anon particularly likes the idea of Loki having very different wings from the rest, and it being yet another point of contention. Is everybody else a swan and he's a hawk? Vice versa? Something entirely different? You tell me, Author!anons!</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ugly Duckling

Loki was never a pretty chick. He was an unbecoming brown where most of his year mates were grey or white and the occasional patch of yellow from a gosling. Songbird chicks, with their naked wings, were hardly very attractive either, but their juvenile feathers grew in while the boys were still dressed in down, and they could cover their wings in the mean time.

Comparing himself with the girls hardly helped the situation either: his silver-grey brother, already pegged as a mute cygnet, was quick to do an irony to his name and joke at every available opportunity about Loki growing up to be a swift. The other chicks were quick to pick up on it, and after that it never really stopped.

Thor grew fast, as cygnets were prone, dulling from silver to full grey with the promise of white, while Loki went from brown to brown to brown and tried to pretend he wasn’t jealous of the burgeoning colours around him. The girls fledged first in a whirlwind of shades: scarlet tanagers and bluebirds and yellowhammers and green jays and purple martins, and at least one utterly unsurprising goshawk (Sif would insist on being different).

Some of the girls were brown as well, but they fledged into nightingales and skylarks and song thrushes, which led to a whole different set of names for Loki. He made “Silvertongue” his own, but it still smarted. Then there was the girl who’d been unfortunately unremarkable as a chick- ugly was not a word Loki liked to use but it was painfully true in this instance- and then had the continued misfortune to fledge late and into grey and brown. Selfish as it was, the lonely turtle dove was a great measure of how much worse his luck could have been.

As the boys finally shed their young colours, Loki found himself hoping there’d be a boy with the same misfortune Sigyn had, with poor colours or build. No such luck. Every boy in his age group save the goslings and cygnets fledged into predator colours. Thor was as white as they’d always know he would be, with a wingspan Loki could only envy, and his team of followers were an even spread of black kite, silver merlin, grey goshawk and one particularly robust brown gander.

Loki was still brown, and his only hope was that his immature plumage might give way to something better.

He looked at himself in the mirror every morning, at his thin form, the expanding width of his wingspan, and desperately hoped he wouldn’t turn out to be a heron. Even a swift- and Thor would never stop laughing if that was the case- would have been better. It would be the worst cosmic joke- as if having the dark hair and eyes in a pale family, the slender one amongst sturdy builds, the academic amongst fighters wasn’t enough- if the eagle-swan royal flock had produced a heron.

When it came to flying, Loki was split from his brother. Swans didn’t fly the way Loki’s breed- and no one had managed to identify that yet- did, but somehow they flew like the buzzards and hawks and falcons. Loki wrote it off as favouritism, like most things in their life, and refused to attend the class he’d been assigned: swifts, swallows and martins. They could go to Hel.

Loki intended to learn the way birds were meant to. He broke the lock on his balcony doors- whoever installed it clearly never thought Loki would favour subtle power over raw force- and stepped out beyond the safety barriers. He wasn’t a chick anymore; he didn’t need them.

It was strange at first to spread his wings and feel the tug of the wind, the warm promise of the thermal just beyond the edge to send him up, up, up... if he could catch it.

It was a long way down if he didn’t.

Sunset gilded his feathers til he thought he could idly believe he was a kite, but he seemed more black than red in the dim light, the sharpening lines of his wingspan like razor blades against the sky. Like a swift? Like a falcon?

He tipped over the edge of the balcony.

Time to find out.


End file.
